Its always so adorable seeing newbies censor their local IP
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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Welcome to Linux. Glad to see you're not letting the hurdles get in your way and are working through solutions. There's more to come.
You say "5 year old laptop" as if that's ancient... 10th gen Intel 😄. I don't even look at laptops newer than 5 years. Don't need much more for internet tasks and office work.
One of my PCs which has Q4OS on it is likely 16+ years old. Really like Linux in general.
Ive got an HP Zbook g6 coming my way soon I'm excited about, and its way overkill for what I'm gonna use it for; i just need a bigger laptop because i have giant meat hooks for hands and I actually use the numpad
Tl;dr, you can get a lot of laptop at decent prices looking at "older" hardware
If you like to tinker learn bash scripting. Also if you need apps just hit me up
IT CAME FROM THE YEAR 2020
My god your install process sounded really difficult.
This coming from someone running a Surface Go 1 and MacBook Pro 2012 which weren’t really linux friendly for the install process.
In the future, I’ll probably only get used devices as I’m kind of anti consumerism, but I’ll be careful to always get something reslly Linux friendly.
My last experience with anything from Dell was my first Linux install in the 00’s and it was really easy. I guess Dell has regressed in this regard.
Anyway welcome to Linux!
I’m glad you said this, I was thinking “I just plug in the USB stick and install Linux”
In fact, the hardest but for me is remembering the special key to press upon boot up so it goes into boot selection mode and I can just select my USB stick…
Some laptops don't really let you boot from external install media so easily nowadays.
I helped a buddy get Linux Mint on their "old" laptop to try it out. But it turned out you needed some manufacturer provided code to unlock booting from anything but the main harddrive within the bios.
We contacted support but never heard back. We did find a work around when they decided to swap the existing HDD for an SSD, they used a USB to sata cable to install Mint on the SSD from their desktop then installed the SSD into their laptop in place of the original drive so it booted straight into that.
Well if it means thst every computer company is starting to make it difficult to change your OS, it’s worrying.
It’s also good that nowadays you have companies like Tuxedo, Slimbook and others, but I prefer recycling old computers given the choice.
if you go in not knowing what to do, it can seem 'difficult'. but it's mostly like on any other oem prebuilt:
optional: prep the target disk (backups, wipe or clear part table, etc), reset bios to defaults.
if necessary: switch from raid or rst to ahci sata mode, default boot mode to efi, disable secure boot. note that some distributions support secure boot but your method of creating an installer might not--you may be able to re-enable if you want after install.
note that hp systems have a hoop to jump through (a confirmation prompt to disable) after disabling secure boot on the next startup. do not use esc key to trigger boot menu, use f9 for boot menu, f10 for bios entry.. as esc will cancel the confirmation code prompt and automatically re-enable secure boot.
insert or plug-in installer, hit the magic key upon power on (f12 for dell, f9 for hp) to bring up boot menu and select installer media, boot and run installer.
Dell has some weird default settings (like RAID by default on single drive systems) that can be a bit janky in general
8GB is the practical minimum these days, most will go to your browser of choice unless it's like Links or something.
I run mint on 4 gb ram without issues. Sure, I'm careful to not open too many apps or too many tabs, but they all work fine. Only 4k video editing is undoable on such a machine. I also have a 4 gb swap partition, but I'm careful to lay off programs when I see it get hit.
My mom uses xfce on a 2 gb laptop. For her is enough, because she only knows how to open a single tab on a browser (mostly fb or yt).
My system uses under 4gb watching a 4k video on youtube. I can't imagine many people are doing anything much more intensive than that.
Most people are running more than one application.
- Vencord is running in the background.
- Most people aren't watching YouTube in 4k on their computer
- I have a good bit of stuff cached in memory (as shown by the different colors in htop)
4GB is usable. I am not trying to fight.
I use quite a bit of old and underpowered kit. But I actually use it. The oldest laptop I use regularly is a 2009 MacBook Pro running Chimera Linux. It is only a Core 2 Duo but it has 8 GB of RAM. It runs all modern browsers and office suites. I can code on it. I can use Docker. I can do dev ops in the cloud. I can call into LLMs. Slow but capable. But I could not do much of this realistically with 4 GB (even slow).
One thing I am not doing is watching videos in 4K. The resolution is 1440x900 so it does not quite display even 1080p natively (so 1080p or even 720p for me—which is totally fine). I suspect most people who really only have 4 GB of RAM are in a similar situation.